In my earlier U.S. Pat. No. 4,836,188, techniques were developed for enabling a physician to obtain three-dimensional or stereo viewing into long thin cavities, such as the nose, mouth, vagina, ear and the like, with an appropriate head or hat-piece and light pipe "scope" supplying light, and with the field of vision enabled through the cone of light, that, unlike prior scope apparatus which enabled only one eye at a time to look into a long cavity, provided for such stereo viewing.
While also concerned with conversion from current-day two-dimensional, monocular vision to stereo viewing, the present invention, on the other hand, deals with an operating instrument that is inserted into body cavities so that operations now being performed with monocular two-dimensional vision can be performed with three-dimensional vision. The instrument is inserted, for example, into the abdomen to perform gallbladder surgery, or into the pelvis to operate on fallopian tubes, or into the sinuses to operate on the sinuses--there being many other uses as well, including in urology, operations upon a prostate and bladder, and in the tracheobronchial tree of the lungs, etc. While my previous stereo scope, above-described, was an apparatus that a physician wears on the head, enabling viewing along long narrow corridors of the body, the apparatus or instrument of the present invention is a working instrument that is inserted into the body and can be used to examine and enable the treatment of internal organs and also can be used to locate disease, with the instrument then being removed.